One of the 46 pages of Albert Einstein’s Grand Theory on display in Jerusalem. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images

As an introduction to one of science's most revolutionary theories, one postcard from Albert Einstein – now on display at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations – is gloriously incongruent. "Dear Mother!" he writes. "Today some happy news. Lorentz telegraphed me that the British expeditions have verified the deflection of light by the sun." So sorry, by the way, to hear that you are not feeling well, he adds.

Thus Einstein reveals to his ailing Jewish mother that he has become famous as a genius, a man who has been vindicated over his claim that gravity can distort the space-time continuum. All that is missing is her reply. "He never writes, he never calls, and suddenly he's cleverer than Isaac Newton," she might have written. Sadly, we will never know.

The rest of the exhibition is made up of cabinets that display all 46 pages of his great work, The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity, which forced scientists to redefine gravity, predicted the existence of black holes and revealed how galaxies are formed. Einstein wrote his theory between November 1915 and May 1916 in his Berlin apartment. Later it was presented to the Hebrew University and is now displayed so that visitors can attempt to follow the thinking of the great scientist. Each page has its own case, each lighted dimly in a room that has been darkened to protect the paper. "We have set [the pages] up like the Dead Sea Scrolls, to protect them but also to give the feeling of entering a kind of holy of holies, which is how we view it," says curator Hanoch Guttfreund. "You can see Einstein work as you look at the pages."

And this is probably the most fascinating part of the show. The pages have many cross-outs and insertions in meticulous penmanship – with an open acknowledgment that some of the maths was beyond even him. His great idea, although startling at the time, has endured. His mother would have been proud.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 19 April 1955: We much regret to announce the death at Princeton, New Jersey, yesterday of Dr Albert Einstein. He was 76. Dr Einstein had entered hospital on Friday for treatment of arterio-sclerosis